Part 1_Episode_3: Nothing bad ever happened to a Story Hunter


Story Hunter, episode 3. Nothing bad ever happened to a Story Hunter. The trouble in this case had begun the night before when Renius got a bad case of gout. His toe had swelled up like an aubergine and he couldn't walk, which was bad because he was the head tracker. One of the great advantages of being with Renius in the bush was that it was like being with a human GPS. He never got lost. He was like a sea turtle with some internal navigation system that could always guide him home. After hours of walking head down staring at faint animal tracks in thick bush, he would walk a beeline through the terrain back to where he had left the land rover. His gout meant it would be Alex and I to guide the group. 


Every year through the winter months in the African bush, I run a retreat series called Track your Life. The idea is a deep immersion into the wild, tracking animals and using the principles and psychology of tracking to discuss how we live and discover our mission and purpose. We're all looking for something, we're all tracking something, and the mentality and the approach of the tracker can help us so much with thinking about this quest and endeavor. The participants had come hoping to find a new way. But now Alex and I were totally lost. It happened slowly and then fast. We cut the tracks of a pride of lions coming into our property. Excitement rippled through the group. This is what we'd been hoping for. We readied ourselves, grabbing rifles. We did a safety briefing and then we started tracking them. 


The tracks ran almost immediately into thick terminalia bushveld. Alex and I were tracking and teaching at the same time. We were concentrating hard so as not to lose the lion tracks. Our heads were down. But then we did lose the tracks. And I remember when I lifted my head there was identical looking brush in every direction.  And that cold chill - anyone who has been lost in the wild - blew like a glacial draft through my confidence. Alex ahead of me still had his head down. I was speaking in Shangan, so the guests wouldn't hear me basically saying where are we going? We were now lost in thick bush, with a pride of lions somewhere close by. Just stand by here, guys. I said to the group, who immediately sensed something was up. I tried to backtrack but because of the hard ground and grass I got into that situation where you lose the track and have to backtrack and then find your own track that you've just made backtracking, and soon you confuse yourself even more. 


My mind flashed to a poem by David Wagoner. It's advice from a native elder to a boy who is lost in the woods, and I really like it. The poem goes like this: Stand still, the trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are  is called here, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger, must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen, it answers. I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again saying Here. No two trees are the same to raven , no two branches are the same to wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, you are surely lost. Stand still, the forest knows where you are. You must let it find you. 


To me, this is Wagner, via a native elder, helping us understand, to become present when we are uncertain where we are. 


That wasn't what was happening to me. Now, you see, the truth is that I was embarrassed. My role as intrepid leader was crumbling into the truth that I was lost, and more than that, I had gotten the participants lost in Lion Country. The situation was wobbling and with it my role and persona was taking a wobble too. 


Now we started walking aimlessly under pressure. Alex and I argued tensely in Shangan. The guests trudged behind us suspiciously. At one point we silenced the group and asked a nearby safari guide, via two-way radio, to rev his Land Rover as loud as he could so we could get a bearing on where the road might be/ “Quiet, quiet.” We said to the guests. “Listen, for an engine revving.” The bush was thick in our face. Far off, we heard the revving. Every guest pointed in a different direction. The sound was bouncing through the thicket. It only added to the confusion. A herd of elephants moving our way compounded the issue. We had to navigate away from them, further confusing our situation. And here's the thing. Objectively, being lost was not a crisis. We would eventually find a road and reorientate ourselves. 


My story about what being lost meant was causing me more stress. An inner voice had started to whisper: “You're not very competent, are you? You've been foolish. You will never get out”. My mind likes to go global and future. “Everyone thinks you don't know what you're doing.” There are sub-stories that build in the meadow when you are lost. 


You see, a story is a layer cake of meaning. Meaning is almost always a constellation of thoughts and beliefs that weave into a story. I was overlaying the situation with an internal narrative. Often what is objectively happening and what we make it mean are not the same. It's an awakened discipline to even be aware of this. The situation in that moment was actually okay. We were uncertain, but nothing terrible was happening. But I was overlaying a whole layer onto it. 


One must learn to choose one’s story. I'm not talking about denial or refusing responsibility. I'm talking about choosing a story, rather, that is generative, a story that sheds the internal critical and gives you space to discover and learn. In this case, in order to change the experience, I had to change the meaning structure of the story internally. 


The remedy to the embarrassment in this instance and the shame was open authenticity, both as part of my internal story and the story I was telling. I remember, turning to the group guys, we're a little lost. It sometimes happens in thick bush when your head is down, and I remember as I said it, it was like someone deflated a balloon in my chest. Suddenly, the pressure started to relieve. We're going to walk for 15 minutes in that direction towards high ground and try and hit a road, said Alex. This step away from my internal story into open authenticity seemed to change the whole energy and the momentum of the group. The energy swung back towards us and now, with that energy swing, a strange thing happened. Because we had been moving intuitively as a result of being lost, we had naturally taken the easiest route through the bush, which is the same route the lions had intuitively walked. And suddenly we were back on the tracks. Then we burst out onto a road, suddenly orientating ourselves and at the same time getting an incredible sighting of the lions that were lying 50 meters up the road. “You see,” said a guest from Switzerland, “sometimes it's good to get lost.” 


Later that day, as we drove back to camp, I heard every person on the back of the safari truck making meaning of the morning in their own way. I was struck by the fact that each person was now story hunting. I realized something you shouldn't go out without your best tracker, said one of the clients. Just mess around until something happens. Being lost is a part of being found. Small lessons were emerging out of the confusion of the morning. 


This is something I've seen endlessly in retreats and ceremony work. People learn the basic universal lesson that there is always something unfolding as it should. The suffering is always your adversity to that unfolding. Telling the internal story, something else should be happening. 


Something happened to the participants on the retreat and they went quickly into the metaphorical, which is one of the profoundly powerful byproducts that occurs in nature. We are pulled into an unfolding, co-creative story. By just being in nature, we are catapulted into meaning-making. If your life has lost meaning, go and spend time in nature. Things will start to happen that will add layers and threads of meaning back in. 


I learnt a lot during those few hours of being lost. I learnt about my own personas and roles and how they hold me hostage, and I learned how authenticity is freedom. I learnt my internal story is like a pair of glasses. I look through into my world and so I must choose my internal story wisely. But most importantly and I've come a very long way around to make the point I learned that nothing bad ever happened to a story hunter. 


Once you have cast yourself as the protagonist and become aware of your story, you have begun to wake up. You can choose supportive meaning-making. Learn to choose your internal story and choice here is an important word. When you take on the role of story hunter, you choose curiosity over control. You choose surrender to what is. Where does the story go? How might I tell this story for humor or drama? 


In doing this, you actively foist yourself from the controlling left brain into the creative right hemisphere. It's very hard to be in your creative right hemisphere and be anxious. When you become the story hunter with creative intention, you choose a creative, anxiety-free right brain state. Literally, on a neurological level, nothing bad ever happened to storyteller, but you must cast yourself as the story hunter, the storyteller. 


In the Safari business we used to have an old equation we would remind ourselves often, particularly when things were going wrong, which they often do in the Safari business - suffering plus time equals humor. Things going wrong plus time equals humor. This equation can put one into a very resilient mindset. I once went for a run in the bush with a buddy James. We set off in the late afternoon into the reserve wearing only running shorts and shoes. It was a stinking hot bush vault day and soon we were sweating profusely as we ran past giraffe and waterbuck and through the clearings. We crossed over the river on a narrow causeway where shallow water ran across cement. Far off in the western mountains, outside of the reserve, dark clouds were building and thunder rumbled, but where we were it was a perfectly sunny day. By the time we returned to the causeway. An hour later, the light was fading and the river had swollen. A flash flood cut us off from the camp as night was falling. By now we had run a far distance and we were tired and dehydrated. As it tends to happen in the bush, things had changed fast. James tried to wade across and was soon washed downstream, resulting in me having to fish him out with a stick. The sky darkened as night fell and a storm from the west blew in. There was no way to get home. We were cut off. We suddenly felt very vulnerable and exposed out in the wilderness, full of lions and leopards and all manner of animals. What lay ahead was a night in the wild with no gear. Luckily, we were able to radio a land rover to come and get us, off a handheld radio, but they soon gave up hope of being rescued as the river rose, preventing even 4x4 vehicles from crossing.


James and I, rather than sleep huddled in the dark against a tree, fearing lions and lightning, decided to run, in the last light, to a cabin on our side of the river. Although the cabin was locked, we would be able to sleep on the veranda, offering us some comfort and shelter. Night was falling fast and we covered the ground on foot and now, in the rain, to the cabin. My adrenaline was spiking. Running through the fading light past wild animals. I remember startling a buffalo in long grass. Yet even as the prospect of a cold night on a hard floor loomed, my inner storyteller was switching on. Suffering plus time equals humor. I knew we were making a story even as we huddled together through the night, cold and miserable drinking rain water dripping off the cabin roof. Somehow knowing we were making a story made me strong. I was paying attention to every element, knowing when we eventually got back to camp we would have so much to tell people. 


At dawn the river was still flooded bank to bank and the rain was still pouring down. We received a radio call that a small plane was leaving an airstrip 15 km north of us. The plane could hop us across to our side  of the river like a small bush-fell taxi. We ran through the rainy wilderness, arriving as the plane idled ready to leave, at the top of the runway. In shorts and soaking wet, we were covered in mud and grass, we boarded the plane looking like Rambo at the end of the movie. “Wow, which safari lodge were you guys staying at?” asked an American tourist as we flopped down and the plane took off. I just smiled because nothing bad ever happened to a story hunter.